> However, one reason I didn't spend more time on it was that it didn't
> seem particularly useful from a sim perspective.  If found that to see
> the effect at reason (<30kt) winds you either need to be sitting on
> the ground or at quite low altitude when your attention is elsewhere.

I think you would see it quite well with a glider when ridge-riding - you're 
moving comparatively slow, you're close to the ground and there is strong wind. 
Also, helicopter pilots would probably appreciate good terrain close-up scenes 
in general - nowadays I quite often take a heli to some mountaintop and back to 
the airports, just because it's so nice to explore the terrain.

In a more general sense, I find it an interesting avenue to make FG more 
interesting for a user community outside flight as well. For instance:

Here

http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19626

is someone using Unity3D to walk through hires terrain with the skybox showing 
FG-rendered terrain and weather to the horizon. What if this were directly 
running in FG (the terrain resolution we can get is quite competitive) - so 
maybe we could eventually have a mode of a walker going out of the aircraft and 
exploring the terrain a bit. Whenever I land in L'Alpe d'Huez, I would like to 
go and have a virtual cup of coffee before heading back... One could start in a 
briefing room in the carrier and walk to the aircraft... You name it.


Here is Chris driving through virtual Innsbruck with a car:

http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19294&start=60#p182039

apparently it's now good enough that this starts getting exciting in its own 
right. Do we perhaps get more of this?

Just to be able to deliver an interesting scene from the ground might open FG 
up a bit more along these lines, and maybe draw some modellers in which 
contribute to the scene.

Then there is the marketing argument - seeing the wind move trees and grass is 
cool - and we get often compared to e.g. Outerra in terms of scenes, so why not 
counter with some cool effects of our own? Reads well on a 'new features' list 
of 3.0...

In practical terms, as you indicated, wind motion isn't excessively expensive - 
usually it's down to a few trigonometric function and some basic arithmetics, 
all of which runs very fast as compared to, say, getting a single noise 
frequency or computing an environment-map reflection. So while it's not 
immediately relevant for flight, I still think it has some reasonable gain for 
pain ratio, especially since we can implement it optional by checkbox.

> However bear in mind that the same
> constants would be used for both oaks and conifers, which I'd expect
> to move different amounts.

You're right - same with the motion of grass and shrub...  It's quite hard to 
come up with closeup motion that looks well on both corn and in the desert. We 
could pass stiffness constants as uniforms if we really like, but I think this 
would be over the top...

* Thorsten
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt
New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service 
that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your
browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic
and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr
_______________________________________________
Flightgear-devel mailing list
Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel

Reply via email to